THE FIRST HUNDRED DAYS

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

If you can see the moon from your window
even through the wall of branches
then it is calling you to worship.
Hard to stay in bed,
impossible to stay in the house.  
If you can see the moon from the front porch,
you can see raccoons and the seven doe
in blue shadows. The owl wonders
what you are doing here.  Thick
wandering roots reach from the trees, 
dusted with a skin of snow, like veins 
on the backs of your hands going 
where they must go. 
If you can see the moon from Earth,
the cataclysm is still in the future.
Your breath is a cloud without shape.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s latest chapbook is Falling Women, with painter Mary Hatch.

TREE TRIPTYCH

by Beth Evans

 

Cuttings

 
I walked the yard recently,
Past the chickens,
You know them well by now,
The compost creators.
Walked until I saw the damaged Rose-of-Sharon.
 
A branch, several branches,
Hung bent to the ground,
Clinging to the center trunk
With shaving of themselves,
Like the first loose tooth of a child,
Hanging by a thread of flesh,
About to part company.
 
I ripped the clinging branches from their mother,
Threw them aside,
More compost,
Feedings for new life,
Leaving a wounded mother,
With one branch embedded, still,
At her side,
No sign of its leaving home.
The mother tree reaching up towards the sky,
Bare,
Bare of most of her branches,
Bare of most of the tender leaves
That the branches shoot out each year,
Year after year,
New every time,
The ever-changing interests and pursuits of her children.
But now they are gone.
As is their future.
 
I have heard,
That entire branches of families
Have been obliterated.
The mother, the father, the grandchildren,
The mother of them all, the grandmother.
Obliterated.
There will no longer be changing interests and pursuits.
There will no longer be their future.
 

Reachings

 
This tree,
This mother has wandering branches
That reach in an undulating choreography towards places,
Each other has never been.
They have their interests,
They follow their pursuits,
They live in their present
And towards their futures.
Not a single one has been cut down,
Though they all range far from the center,
Pilgrimage, the Hajj, Aliyah.
Risking annihilation in the
Moving winds of time and space.
The center holds.
I tell Yeats.
It is in their wandering,

Courage of exploration and redefinition,

That the core gains its strength.
 

Leavings

 
I woke this morning with a poem in my head.
                The black sheep
                Creep
                Away.
                They never fit in their flock.
                Do better in the outskirts,
                Do better where they find other black sheep,
                Or pink sheep,
                Or green sheep,
                Or no sheep at all.
                And find their home among the antelopes,
                Or the orangutans,
                Or even among the wolves.
 
My son has left me,
Gone to find his new home
In the mountains or the meadows or a desert,
Like the branches of the bush that now lie rotting in my yard,
Like the branches that leap from the undulating tree,
Like the sheep that leave the flock.
He tells me,
That when he has a daughter,
He will name her Rose of Sharon,
And he has not even read the Grapes of Wrath,
Or the Bible.
But he has walked in this same yard,
Past the chickens,
Past the wounded tree,
When in his day,
It grew strong and whole,
As wood should,
And he will still,
See a future,
And procreate.

The poet, Beth Evans, lives in Brooklyn, NY and writes with the Thursday Morning Poets. She holds a master's degree in English literature and works as an academic librarian. She is currently overseeing the care and maintenance of her son's 23 chickens in her urban backyard with her pitbull Chichi and her cat Shadow.

OLIVES

by Gabriella Brand

Johannesburg-born artist Adam Broomberg, 53, took photographs of olive trees to his mother just before she died in December last year. She had been an ardent supporter of the state of Israel and a firm Zionist. Like many people in South Africa’s Jewish community, her family were Holocaust survivors. Both her parents lost 90% of their family in that pogrom. Broomberg has been taking pictures of ancient olive trees in Palestine for the past 18 months — most of them were planted more than a thousand years ago. The oldest one, called the Al-Badawi tree, is over 4 500 years old. Every two years this tree still yields 800kg of olives. It is nearly 20m high and has a circumference of 25m. “There is the sweetest man who lives there; at night he sleeps underneath the Al-Badawi tree just to protect it,” Broomberg tells me on a Zoom call from Berlin, where he is now based. “I was meant to go on 23 October, to take seven of my students to Palestine to go and pick olives from the Al-Badawi tree, because it is olive-picking season.” But the Israeli war—many describe it as a genocide—on Gaza, about 75km away, has put a firm brake on that plan. “It’s heart-breaking not to be able to go there,” Broomberg says. He pauses and closes his eyes. Since 1967 more than 800 000 of these trees have been either uprooted or burnt to the ground by Israeli authorities or by illegal Jewish settlers under the supervision of the military. Between August 2020 and 2021, more than 9 300 olive trees were destroyed in the West Bank, according to The Art Newspaper.  —Mail & Guardian (South Africa), October 21, 2023

Is there anything more innocent than olives,
green and heavy on the branch, 
Is there anything more peaceful than those branches,
Or more gentle than the wind chime of those leaves?

Isn’t it always the olive branch offered, between man and wife,
Between nations, the olive branch carried off to the Moon, even,
coded into statue and treaty, held out with pleading arms
Noah, himself, relieved when the dove returns 
with that verdant sign in its beak.
Mud receding, the return of life. 

Deborah was going to pick olives this fall
a special harvest program, there, by the Mediterranean 
Israelis gathering with Palestinians, Palestinians picking next to Israelis
Round hard olives in their hands, not stones, not weapons. just olives
An effort to extract some small oily, slippery drops of justice. 

And then came the news, the shock of it,
in that holy, but defiled place 
and the world gasped in horror
and the olives flew off the trees
bleeding, ripped, raped, burned
and the trees fell to the ground
and hope scattered and hid.

So many wrongs
No matter from which  hillside you gaze
The soil festers with pain 
Hate fueled, fertilized, continued. 
Why can’t there just be olives?


Gabriella Brand’s work has appeared worldwide  in over fifty literary magazines. Her latest U.S published poems and short stories can be found in Abandoned Mine, Syncopation, and Amaranth Journal. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Gabriella lives near New Haven, Connecticut, where she teaches foreign languages.